Postscript: Satoru Iwata (1959-2015)

Nintendo understands the value of mascots better than most companies. Soon after Mario first appeared, in the early nineteen-eighties, he had become more recognizable to American children than Mickey Mouse. His creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, turned into something of a mascot, too, an embodiment of Nintendo’s restlessly inventive approach to game design. And then there was Satoru Iwata, perhaps the only chief executive of a multibillion-dollar company to have a cameo in a video game (2006’s WarioWare: Smooth Moves) and to be celebrated for it rather than ridiculed. He died on Saturday, at the age of fifty-five.

Iwata’s ascent at Nintendo was unusual. He came to the company from HAL Laboratory, where he had begun working as a computer-science major at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. (HAL was named that way, Iwata said, because each of its initials preceded those of I.B.M.) A programmer at the time, he helped create many of HAL’s most important titles; in 1993, he was promoted to company president. In 2000, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had led Nintendo for fifty-three years, despite professing to know nothing about video games, invited Iwata to join the company. Two years later, Yamauchi asked Iwata to succeed him as president and C.E.O. It was the first time in Nintendo’s century-long history that the post had been given to someone outside the founding family.

As a leader, Iwata was known for his approachability. “On my business card, I am a corporate president,” he said, during a speech in 2005. “In my mind, I am a game developer. But, in my heart, I am a gamer.” He was, in other words, multilingual, able to speak to shareholders, creators, and consumers. He hosted a video series on the Nintendo Web site called “Iwata Asks,” in which he interviewed his teams about their work. “I remember him as being very actively interested in everything you had to say, and always talking about the technical aspects of making games,” Dylan Cuthbert, a developer in Kyoto who once appeared on the series, told me. “He’d even translate techno gobbledygook to people around him without a technical background.” Iwata’s knowledge of programming—he worked on some of Nintendo’s best-loved games, including Earthbound, The Legend of Zelda, and the Animal Crossing series—made him sympathetic to the rigors of imaginative game-making. “I never sensed that he thought he was more important, smarter, or more powerful than me, although he was all those things,” Martin Hollis, who has worked on many Nintendo titles, said. “I never felt he was my boss, or my boss’s boss. I felt he was a friend who was trying to help me in my projects. There isn’t another person like him in the world.”

Iwata’s nous wasn’t limited to his ability to charm those on the shop floor. “He was confident enough to run against the common trends in the market,” Rhodri Broadbent, who worked on Nintendo’s Star Fox series, told me. “He moved in those directions only when doing so would be of benefit to the core business.” Iwata scored an early triumph, in 2004, with the release of the Nintendo DS, a handheld game system that boasted two screens, one of which was touch-activated. (The system has since sold more than a hundred and fifty million units across its various iterations.) Then, in 2006, with the Wii console, he demonstrated that a company could achieve success through technological invention rather than technological dominance. While Nintendo’s competitors chased higher resolutions and storage capacities and more sophisticated interfaces, the Revolution, as the Wii was known during development, took a different approach. In particular, the controller, which looked like a TV remote and could be swung like a tennis racquet or a baseball bat to achieve similar effects onscreen, made the medium freshly accessible. The system sold more than a hundred million copies.

Iwata also appeared to maintain a belief in the creative worth of video games. “Our ambition is to satisfy people’s need to be happy, through our software,” he once said. “People want to play because human beings want to be human beings—and we are the only species on Earth that loves to play.” Much has been made of Nintendo’s recent financial troubles—a nearly half-billion-dollar loss during the last fiscal year, largely attributed to the company’s failure to explain and market the Wii U, its successor to the Wii. But its human losses (Gunpei Yokoi, the Game Boy’s inventor, in 1997; Hiroshi Yamauchi, the third president of Nintendo, in 2013; and now Iwata) may be more profound. There is an old saying in the industry: “Never underestimate Nintendo.” Despite its size and heritage, the company has repeatedly proved its ability to remain agile and relevant. But this latest loss, as much as any that the company has sustained before it, is a cutting one.